Probing Obama's secrecy games

[Kevin_Kennedy]

Will high-level Obama officials who leak for political gain be punished on equal terms with actual whistleblowers?

Over the past several months, including just last week, I’ve written numerous times about the two glaring contradictions that drive the Obama administration’s manipulative game-playing with its secrecy powers: (1) at the very same time that they wage an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, they themselves continuously leak national security secrets exclusively designed to glorify Obama purely for political gain; and (2) at the very same time they insist to federal courts that these programs are too secret even to confirm or deny their existence (thereby shielding them from judicial review or basic disclosure), they run around publicly boasting about their actions. Just over the past month alone, they have done precisely this by leaking key details about Obama’s commanding role in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, drone attacks that have killed allegedly key Al Qaeda figures, sophisticated cyber-attacks on Iran’s nuclear program, and the selection of targets for Obama “kill list”: all programs that are classified and which the White House has insisted cannot be subjected to judicial review or any form of public scrutiny.

Probing Obama’s secrecy games - Salon.com

So it appears that leaks are alright, just so long as it makes the President look good. But my favorite part comes later in the piece.

The House is holding a hearing today to investigate whether the Obama administration provided classified information about the bin Laden raid to Hollywood filmmakers to enable them to produce a pre-election hagiographic account that glorifies the President; here’s what Jeremy Scahill reports about that hearing:

Threatening whistleblowers with decades in prison for “espionage” — while shuffling classified information to Hollywood producers to enable production of an Election Year propaganda film (about a covert action you insist to courts cannot be the subject of disclosure) — is corruption quite extreme.

If only Bradley Manning had made a movie rather than sending that information to WikiLeaks, he might have gotten promoted rather than arrested.